The company that sells lost airplane luggage
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
I phoned the airline. They had found it. Getting it back was impossible. It was apparently sent to Helsinki, then back to Heathrow in London. The airline just say "we had it sent to London - ask there. We're done."
Fine, but if you go to LHR and ask where the lost property office is, you are met by blank looks. No one knows. There are 5 4?) terminals, all are huge. Someone says there might be something air side in T3, someone else says there might be something near the car park in T5. Others appear to find the very concept of lost property novel and confusing.
I found one place, but they only did lost property for select airlines, and even then it is not open to the public. WTF?
It pushes me off to know that my tablet was sold off to someone despite spending ages schlepping around LHR trying to get it, having been in contact with the original airline and having it sent to London.
The concierge from my hotel called the next day, and my headphones were reunited on my return to the airport.
Considering the volume of traffic that airport sees I was quite impressed.
I asked if they had received the easyjet report. They almost laughed. Of course they hadn't.
> In 1992, Roy Hall, a 46-year-old minister, bought a royal blue Hickey-Freeman jacket at Unclaimed Baggage. When he took it home, he noticed the name “Whitey Ford” — a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Yankees — written inside of it. Informed of the find, Ford asked for his jacket back; Hall decided to keep it.
Who cares if it’s true; the minister is like, “return a lost article to its rightful owner? Nah.”
There’s centuries of common law that back this up. It sucks, yes.
That can't be the whole story though. You can't keep stolen property, even if you bought it from a 3rd party and were under the impression that the transaction was legal. Lost&found might not be stolen, but if the airline 'finds it' without the intention to return it, it's not that far off.
In fact, given the improvements in luggage tracking, in recent years, I'd bet "Unclaimed Luggage" is mostly a lie as well. My guess is that a very small percentage of the store's inventory comes from lost airline luggage these days. Most likely, it's stuff left behind at hotels, abandoned storage units, "imperfect" textiles and goods, pawn store inventories, police confiscations, bankruptcy auctions, even lost/overboard shipping containers.
edit: I'd appreciate some explaining regarding the downvotes, is someone expecting me to cite the law ?
There’s an entirely separate moral/ethical argument aside from the legal one where one may decide they should return it based on their own morals/ethics.
What I wrote is not up to debate, it's common in the law in the US and in most of Europe (AFAICT).
You can debate the finer points (that's why I wrote “actual wording and consequences may vary depending on where you live”) but the idea is still the same. Don't mess with stolen stuff.
Eg: In Scotland, when goods are stolen, the person who originally owned them is still the legal owner. If you discover you've bought stolen goods you should stop using them immediately. If you know who the legal owner of the goods is you should inform them that you have their goods and let them take them away. If you don’t give them back and the owner finds out you have them, the owner can apply for a court order to make you return the goods.
Verbatim: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/scotland/consumer/somethin...
We could debate the moral/ethical argument but I purposely didn't take that approach.
edit: ah, I see, I didn't understand why you used the phrasing “Yes, if you claim it was ‘stolen’,” and thought it was a universal “you” but you were talking about the very specifics of that case. I don't know why, I got on the macro level too soon.
Of course, I see, we now have to check what the law says or allows for that company about unclaimed luggage and the best efforts the company made to find the rightful owner before being granted ownership of the jacket.
IMO, your comment contributes to the topic of discussion.
Easiest entries are:
1. The extremely diverse morals, frameworks, ethics, and actions different people draw from same source materials.
2. The multitude of ethical frameworks and moral people without religious roots
Most of their inventory appears to be comprised of clothing and accessories. I can’t really assess pricing there, but if it’s anything like the pricing for electronics, they’re preying on impulse buyers.
[0]: https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/products/geforce-gtx-1050-t...
The amount of care taken to price each item depends on whether it can be identified by brand or model. Items without either usually fall into a generic category based on the shape, weight, and ports.
It could be considered "worth it" to dig through every shelf, bin, and table in Electronics for some seriously capable but nondescript tech if there wasn't a pandemic on. The online selection is limited to popular, identifiable items at high prices.
That seems a bit odd, though. While there were undoubtedly some good deals on electronics, the ones I saw were all on sale—which, according to their return policy, apparently also means “all sales final.” Given that a number of those items were high-risk, the price tags were concerning.
For example, they seem to be selling modern, high-end iPhones in the $6XX range. That’s a bit cheaper than buying a stolen iPhone on Let Go, Craigslist, or Facebook Marketplace where I live.
That’s incredibly high risk. At any point, the former owner of the phone may report it lost to their carrier, and the IMEI will be blacklisted. From that point forward, the phone is effectively a brick. It may be useful for parts, but that’s it.
Does the former owner have the right to report it missing, especially if they’ve been compensated? It doesn’t really matter—the point is that they can, and they may even do so inadvertently when they go to buy a new one.
This sounds like a store I’d love to visit in person—so many obscure items that are probably too difficult to price correctly. You’re bound to find a gem eventually. Even if it isn’t worth the time you spend, it’s probably a lot of fun!
But I don’t really think that business model lends itself to eBay. Yes, you can have much wider reach and sell to more people, but your margins are going to be lower. Is it worth it? Maybe if you’re running out of space, but the prices they’re charging for some of the items on their website would have to be significantly reduced if they were to sell those items on eBay.
Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough, but when I went there a few years ago, it was pretty hard to find anything that was actually a good deal. The vast majority of the store is "normal" stuff (mostly random clothing and books) that's priced about the same as everywhere else, and even the obscure items are surrounded by crowds of people who have already looked over everything.
I don't doubt that if you went enough times, you might eventually find something under-priced, but for the most part it's just a somewhat-overpriced thrift shop (and not particularly fun, IMO).
There were also compelling prices on some Apple Watch accessories and certain videogames, but others had ridiculous prices.
E.g. in Canada: Air Passenger Protection complaints: https://rppa-appr.ca/file-air-travel-complaint
In Quebec, lawyers aren’t even allowed in small claims courts.
I'd wager most of those items are pre-TSA anyway as they have a pattern of stealing things. Years ago I visited the Microsoft employee store in Redmond where you could buy Xbox games for super cheap. They actually had a sign at the register warning people not to put them in checked bags because they disappeared.
How do you know it's TSA and not the airline's baggage handlers? The latter actually handle your bags a lot more than the former (and do so in places which are not monitored with security cameras).
TSA gets the advantage of seeing inside of the bags on a screen to know which ones to “pull for more inspection”.
Right now they have no incentive to improve themselves or prevent theft by underpaid, overworked baggage handlers.
Every suitcase is labeled with a name and a flight. They know exactly who the baggage belongs to, they just can't be bothered to call people who forgot a suitcase or send people their luggage back. I don't see why we should accept anything other than either return of the baggage or full compensation.
And no, not every suitcase is labeled, that's the entire point. Luggage gets lost when those tags get torn off, chewed up, etc. Luggage is handled by both humans and conveyor belts, and all sorts of things can go wrong.
And how would you define "full compensation"? If your luggage is lost, you could just lie and say it was carrying a million dollars in cash. How is anybody going to prove what full compensation is?
Or, if you were required to declare the value of your luggage when checking in, and you said it was a million dollars, the airline would just say nope, not gonna take it. Too risky for us if we lose it, which we can't guarantee because we employ fallible human beings.
Smart people work on this. The current solution really is a pretty good one, for what's practically achievable given the price you pay for your ticket.
Most companies are not interested in guaranteeing the transportation of extreme valuables because it's not a service they can profitably provide at a level people are willing to pay for.
I do think some people dismiss systems that work well enough and which just aren't worth getting another tenth of a percent out of. Airline baggage tracking has actually gotten a lot better over the past few decades. The only time I've had luggage significantly delayed in decades was the result of a canceled international connection which involved being transferred to a different airline. That cost me a fair bit of money and was almost much worse than it was but it was one time.
>Every suitcase is labeled with a name and a flight. They know exactly who the baggage belongs to, they just can't be bothered to call people who forgot a suitcase or send people their luggage back.
They do have an incentive: The $3k compensation. The fact that that's not enough, shows that it's a bit more complex then calling people.
>I don't see why we should accept anything other than either return of the baggage or full compensation.
Because otherwise accepting luggage would be to risky for airlines, or, as another commenter suggested, they'd have to make people buy insurance.
For whatever it's worth, I once lost my drivers license on an airplane and it was returned to me in the mail a few months later. Of course, returning a drivers license cost them a lot less (nothing) than returning luggage would have. I'm not sure they had an incentive to return it though, beyond basic courtesy.
(Evidently if you drop a drivers license in the mail without postage or an envelope, the USPS will send it on to whatever address is listed on it.)
In fact if you want to do one better charge a small conveyance fee for the cost of handling it say $10 and the incentives will be ever better aligned with doing a reasonable job.
The title is misleading but it's explained in the post, these are "unclaimed luggage". Most likely the owner decided to take the compensation option when it was taking too long for the airline to find it.
The article does mention a case of someone finding his own item in that store, more by accident than by intentionally looking for it.
I'd have to have something astronomically valuable or personally significant to me in order to go all the way to Alabama and root around in a warehouse just for the off-chance of finding it.
Most people aren't flying with the sole manuscript for their novel checked in their baggage. How much time do you think they're going to be willing to invest in getting some old clothes back? They just claim on insurance and forget about it.
Precisely what's described in TFA.
"A presidential platinum Rolex watch worth $64k (sold for $32k)"
"A 5.8-carat diamond ring appraised for $46k (sold for $23k)"
Or, more poignantly (but perhaps less factually specific) from the intro:
"A few days later, a retired mechanic named Charlie buys your grandfather’s watch for $150 ... and ... a nurse from Florida becomes the proud new owner of the scarf your mum knitted you for Christmas."
The first couple may be something you'd overlook if $-reimbursed by insurance, but I could imagine circumstances where the last couple of examples would inspire a ceaseless search.
It says this in the article only a third of it is worth selling at any price.
> In the end, only about one-third of the items in baggage end up for sale
I understand that a lot of business flyers would write off their underwear, toothbrush, and gym shoes -- but I don't think GP was suggesting those people should be dumpster diving in Alabamaba. (I'm in Australia, and I really don't have any idea how inconvenient it is to get to Alabama, and to then dive through a warehouse of bags, assuming it's even possible.)
> They're listing outlying extreme cases. Most people aren't travelling with a $64k watch in their checked baggage. It says this in the article only a third of it is worth selling at any price.
Totally agree - but the point is that in some cases (npi) there clearly were valuables worth the effort, at least from a naive calculation perspective.
There are also multiples of this watch for ~$25,000 on chrono24, it’s not as desirable like the steel rolexes are.
Good luck! :-)
Some people live far enough from Alabama that it's inconvenient to visit the store every couple of days to check.
The airline holds luggage for at least 3 months; then there's the time taken to ship it to Alabama, pile it in the corner, sort it, price it, and put it out. I like Scottsboro, but hanging around for months on the off chance that Granma's sweater will show up is just not going to happen.
Oh, and it's "Unclaimed Baggage".
Relatively recently (I don't go over there often), the store has had a small selection of firearms, I assume from lost checked luggage.
As an aside, you know those knives and such confiscated at airport security? States sell them. There is a warehouse in Austin with a bunch of related stuff, including collectible knives if you're interested in such things. It also disposes of retired state office furniture and things like what the GSA sells for the federales at gsaauctions.gov.
(Edit: misread)
> If you’ve ever permanently lost a checked bag, your stuff probably ended up for sale at a store in Scottsboro, Alabama.
Post-edit reply: again, this article is about a store in Alabama, not Arizona.
Meaning if I buy a rare musical instrument from this unclaimed baggage company, I have to live with the possibility forever that someone else might show up at my door with a sheriff and take my musical instrument because they were the original owner?
Edit: found a website: https://www.kofferauktion24.de/
> Cash only. EC and credit card payments are unfortunately not possible.
Wow, the amounts of cash some of the serious buyers must be arriving with!